Abstract

The article is devoted to the topical problem of political and cultural transformations in the interaction between political power and its only source in democratic discourse, the people. This eternal problem of political science and policy is considered in chronological order in the global context and in today’s Ukraine. In traditional societies, there was a remote and alienated coexistence of state institutions and the masses. The exception was the democratic republics of ancient polises. The modern era generates a contractual theory of the origin of the state, which considers the institutions of power as the result of a social agreement between the sovereign people and the governors. In the modern era in the middle of the twentieth century, the concept of the welfare state was formed. In the postmodern era, unstable life forces citizens to behave in relation to state power, depending on the actualization of a particular guise of their own existence. Citizens are losing a clear, unambiguous idea of state power, its functions, place and role in society.